Entries by David Mayer

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Why Some Americans Don’t Believe the Election Results

The electoral votes have confirmed Joe Biden won the 2020 United States presidential election. The presidential electors gave Biden 306 electoral votes to President Donald Trump’s 232 votes. Biden also recorded a solid lead of over 7 million in the popular vote. Nonetheless, results from a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey found that approximately three-quarters of Republicans did not trust the […]

David Mayer Writes For Fast Company

David Mayer, associate professor of management and organizations at the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business has recently signed on as a monthly contributor to Fast Company, writing about business ethics and leadership.

From their website: Fast Company “is the world’s leading progressive business media brand, with a unique editorial focus on innovation in technology, ethical economics, leadership, and design.”

We invite you to read David Mayer’s recent essays by clicking on this link to his Fast Company author profile.

Featured Collaborator of July/August: David Mayer

Interview with David Mayer, associate professor in the Management and Organizations Area at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan

What are your main areas of research? 

I am an organizational scholar who focuses primarily on one fundamental question: When and why do individuals in organizations engage in unethical and prosocial behavior? More specifically, I am interested how the social environment in organizations (e.g., leadership, peers, organizational climate, organizational practices) impacts unethical and prosocial behavior.

I am also fascinated with the question of whether employees and leaders think that business and work are part of the moral domain of social life and I have worked on several papers that demonstrate that at times “business” and “ethics” are inseparable and at times they are, as the truism suggests, an oxymoron.

In contrast to the bulk of work taking a social science lens on ethics, I typically take a positive lens by not focusing solely on identifying pitfalls and biases that lead to unethical behavior, but by understanding how the context at work can improve prosocial behavior, how employees and leaders in organizations can influence others to do good, and when leaders and employees are most likely to act in ways that suggest they consider work to be a moral domain.